Trakus aims to attract new generation of racegoers

In the late 1960s, one of Australia's most astute track watchers, Des Spain, would get together with six other racing enthusiasts each Saturday before the first race at the metropolitan meeting.

They would sit high in the grandstand and each was given three runners to follow, monitor and, if they had time, put them against the stopwatch.

Clock watcher: Form guru Des Spain times the gallops, 1960s style.

In those days, there were no videos or anything that carefully monitored each runner on a professional level – just photo strips in newspapers.

In Sydney, George Moore, arguably Australia's greatest jockey of the time, paid a local projectionist good money to film metropolitan races.

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Moore was also seeking to gain the edge on his rivals.

On Friday night at the Moonee Valley meeting, a state-of-the-art racing monitoring system made its debut in Melbourne.

Trakus started life by measuring the speed of hockey players and American footballers and a decade later is now very much part of horse racing across America and Asia.

It's brilliant yet simple. Trakus will monitor a race – the speed, the sectional times and even the price of the horse you've backed down to the closest cent.

Its ability to track horses is so accurate and easy to follow that you won't even have to find the jockey's colours as the horse's number will be easy to follow.

The Trakus system uses a network of antennas at the racecourse and small radio tags are fitted into the saddle towels of each horse to track it 30 times per second.

The data is presented instantaneously on the broadcast, and it's also immediately available for presentation in web and mobile formats.

In fact, many sporting organisations across the world are taking more than a passing interest in Trakus, according to president and CEO Bob McCarthy.

"Trakus is all about fan engagement. Trakus makes it easier for racing fans to follow their horses during a race," he said.

"At racecourses across the world ... Trakus delivers instantaneous 3D graphics identifying the position and speed of each horse, and automates the collection of performance information such as sectional times and margins for horses in every race.

"With Trakus, punters preparing for an upcoming race will now be able to compare trip distance for each horse with their past performances, which is especially important for races with horses running four or five around a turn in order to understand whether a horse with a wide trip may have actually travelled faster than the winner."

All of the information is monitored, directed and consumed at the Trakus base in Boston.

Since Trakus turned its attention to horse racing, the demand has been overwhelming.

Currently Trakus is in use in New York, Kentucky, California, Florida, Indiana, Canada, Turkey, Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong.

Trakus is keen to roll out its timing mechanisms in Australia. "Today's consumers demand more from their gaming and entertainment experience and Trakus is a key element in enhancing the racing industry's ability to retain and attract new fans," McCarthy said.

"Trakus digitises races, enabling the content to be delivered in ways that are highly suited for today's sports-viewing audience. And there is one common cause that every racing jurisdiction shares and that is attracting that new generation of racegoers back to the racetrack but in an exciting and compelling way."

And McCarthy believes that Trakus can improve the way we enjoy racing.

"The trend in the consumer expectation of information-rich applications at their fingertips is undoubtedly increasing over time. The opportunity for racing is to deliver content wherever, whenever, and however consumers want it," he said.

"While overall gaming and entertainment trends have grown at an astonishing rate, horse racing has not kept up.

"A key factor in staying competitive is innovation, and Trakus technology offers the key tool in engaging current and new racing fans, enabling racing to reach a broader audience and market," he said.

In Australia, the Trakus technology introduced on Friday night will represent the first step of a longer-term objective to expand upon the coverage of Victorian racing within Australia and internationally.

"When we look into racing's future, we see an ideal match for today's generation of video gamers, sports enthusiasts, prospective new racing fans, who are entirely comfortable making financial transactions on a mobile handset and have grown to expect digital content to be delivered in a user-controlled format," McCarthy said.

"Trakus-equipped racetracks represent over 60 per cent of North American horse racing and nearly 18 per cent of worldwide turnover of $121 billion."

And for the likes of Des Spain and George Moore, Trakus is a further extension of gaining an edge and trying to simplify a sport that will never be an exact science.